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OAS panel accusing Venezuela of “crimes against humanity” is grilled on moral hypocrisy and open bias

An
OAS panel featured condemnations of Venezuela’s human rights
violations by one of the world’s most prominent defenders of
Israeli atrocities

by
Max Blumenthal

On May
29, a panel of self-described independent experts convened a press
conference at the Organization of American States in Washington DC.
The panel presented a 400-page report accusing the Venezuelan
government of crimes against humanity and demanding the prosecution
of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at the International Criminal
Court.

The
panel comprised a collection of aggressive advocates of regime change
in Venezuela. I attended the event to question the self-proclaimed
experts on their ulterior agenda and the absurd contradictions behind
their claims to support universal human rights.

“With
right-wing allies ruling Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru, the OAS
has faded back into its history as an instrument of US domination of
Latin America,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research, told the Grayzone Project.

Weisbrot
added OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro, “is obsessed with
Venezuela, and determined to do whatever he can to achieve regime
change there, by any means necessary.”

According
to Weisbrot, “Almagro has been campaigning to topple the
government of Venezuela for years now, he supports the illegal
financial embargo against Venezuela — which actually violates the
OAS charter itself, among other international treaties and
conventions. But he even goes a step further, proposing an embargo on
Venezuela’s oil exports, which shows his complete indifference to
the suffering of Venezuelans, or their deaths from shortages of
medicines.”

Joining
Almagro on the panel was Santiago Canton, an Argentinian lawyer who
has leveraged his position in various international bodies to push
regime change in Venezuela. In 2002, after a right-wing putsch
briefly removed Hugo Chavez from power, Canton delivered a letter to
the coup leaders on behalf of the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights addressing the dictatorship as a legitimate government.

Canton
previously led the Latin America Program of the National Democratic
Institute (NDI), an arm of the US-backed National Endowment for
Democracy, which has contributed large sums of money to
pro-opposition organizations and parties in Venezuela. The NDI’s
sister group, the International Republican Institute, vocally backed
the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez. (At the time, the IRI was chaired
by Sen. John McCain).

In
introducing the OAS panel on Venezuela, Almagro declared that his
organization was a “moral force” with a special mandate to mete
out justice against Caracas.

Rounding
out the panel was Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian parliamentarian and
veteran Israel lobbyist who recently blamed Palestinians for Israel’s
killing of 62 protesters in one day in the Gaza Strip. Like a
Canadian version of Alan Dershowitz, Cotler reflexively rushes out in
Israel’s defense whenever it is accused of committing atrocities
against Palestinians.

Cotler
has also served as a legal advocate for Leopoldo Lopez, the
imprisoned right-wing coup leader and orchestrator of Venezuela’s
violent guarimbas. Sparing no opportunity for hyperbole, he used his
time on the panel to accuse Venezuela’s government of carrying out
the worst humanitarian crisis in the history of Latin America.

In the
video below, you can watch me question the panelists about their
claims of independence and moral consistency:

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